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We're living in a time when so many of the civil rights and social justice organizations are run by lawyers and policy people who are often very disconnected from the communities they claim to represent.

Michelle Alexander

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Michelle Alexander
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Often
Claim
Social
Civil
Running
Lawyer
Many
Policy
Disconnected
Time
Justice
Lawyers
People
Rights
Organizations
Community
Represent
Living
Communities

More quotes by Michelle Alexander

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Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern.
Michelle Alexander
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One of those lies is that all we need to do is elect more Democrats. No. That actually isn't going to get us to the Promised Land.
Michelle Alexander
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The dramatically different manner in which we, as a nation, responded to the crisis presented by drunk driving and the crisis caused by the emergence of crack cocaine speaks volumes about who we value, and who we view as disposable.
Michelle Alexander
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Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.
Michelle Alexander
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Of course it would make far more sense to invest in education and job creation in poor communities of color, rather than spend billions of dollars caging them and monitoring them upon release.
Michelle Alexander
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Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.
Michelle Alexander
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The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.
Michelle Alexander
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Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime, but the enemy in this war has been racially defined. Not by accident, the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown - for decades - the people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.
Michelle Alexander
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Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.
Michelle Alexander
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We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison - discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.
Michelle Alexander
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The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.
Michelle Alexander
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Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
Michelle Alexander
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For those interested in learning more about corporations and private individuals profiting from the caging of human beings, I highly recommend the book Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration.
Michelle Alexander
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I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.
Michelle Alexander
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Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
Michelle Alexander
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Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what is that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?
Michelle Alexander
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The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.
Michelle Alexander
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The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.
Michelle Alexander
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I think it's critically important that the people who have been most harmed by mass incarceration, by mass deportation, by neoliberalism, by all of it, not only have a voice in crafting these platforms but emerge and are supported as real leaders in these movements.
Michelle Alexander
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Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.
Michelle Alexander